I wonder why they didn’t choose a more local name like they do with most of their products. Are you saying there isn’t an african term for music beats that’s not as catchy (even more) than the likes of mdundo?

This is true. And we don’t have the numbers that Apple, Groove Music, Spotify etc have. This plan seems odd as it’s not easily scalable. I would have thought African telcos would come together and create a continent wide music distribution system, leverage on the amount of content to attract users and eventually revenue.

Trey:

Very few kenyan artists have songs on Deezer and Apple Music.

This is not out of choice. There are certain requirements needed to have your music on these stores and not everyone has those resources. Apple for instance,if you go at it alone, you need:

At least 20 albums in your catalog.

UPCs/EANs/JANs for all products you intend to distribute.

ISRCs for all tracks you intend to distribute.

As you can see, the first three alone are impossible for a new artist to achieve

Apple ID

Universal Product Codes & International Standard Recording Codes

US Tax ID

Legal Secretary

Individual contracts for each region where you want your music available

The alternative is to go with an approved Aggregator (Basically brokers/middle men, experts in delivering content to iTunes. For a fee they can correctly format and deliver your content to Apple’s specifications). This is easier and cheaper for most artists.

$49.99/year per album (regardless of how many songs are on the album).

Artist retains rights to their work, and take home 70% after the aggregator & iTunes take their cut. The turn around time is anywhere from 3 days to 8 weeks depending on your store of choice - Apple is quicker. or Spotify which takes longer.

Trey:

30 percent is not what international artists are earning. As far as I am concerned, this is a new money grab from Safaricom.

This is true. There are too many middle men in Kenya making money from creators (and farmers)

This is absurd. WTH! If SafCon really wants to pay kenyan artists like their International counterparts then a 70/30 split in favour of artists should be negotiated.

Apple have repeatedly said they don’t really make money from the iTunes store. It’s more of a revenue retention platform - provide content for users so they buy other apple products - and they achieve this through other ways like offering complimentary cloud storage - 5GB, cross device syncing etc. A telco like this one that ‘innovates’ through borrowing can find something to put as a value add.

As for the taxes, safcons size means it would be getting tax breaks to operate in Kenya. That plus it’s partially govt owned so their expenses aren’t as much. These breaks if extended to artists would mean they get the actual 70% royalties instead of being taxed to death.

kiharajon:

Maybe safaricom will include a streaming bundle, for the app, will it be audio only or will artists also have video?

Agile dev means that audio only is their best bet right now. Primary concern is data and as long as we live in a bundles world, such services will never reach their true success potential. This service needs the telco to adapt their approach towards hybrid uncapped data plans

But (no offence) a large coprporate, being a large corporate, will probably screw it up in some way.

No offence taken. I expect them to shortchange their users every chance they get - they are profit first then people later - which is why this thread will help us outline as many expectations as we would like, so when the app does come, we have a measuring stick.

No I haven’t. I am aware there are cheaper alternatives out there and I’m glad the specifics are being pointed out.

What this means is there is no reason Kenyan creators cannot receive the 70% revenue that’s owed to them.

Give artists 70% of all revenue

Zero rate the apps data usage during the trial.

Have an affordable package unlike the ridiculousness that is their video streaming bundles.

Don’t steal people’s bundles (How would they steal bundles? Aside from how they’ve (allegedly) normally been doing it by running scripts that deduct data while people sleep) By pushing music at a higher bitrate than necessary)

Basically 3 streaming options:

~96 kbps - Normal quality on mobile. This is the minimum the streaming app should support. Most phones in Kenya are low-mid range so it’d be appropriate plus it will lessen the load for zero rated streaming.

~160 kbps - Desktop and web player standard quality. High quality on mobile. For majority of the paying customers on mobile and default rate for web

~320 kbps Desktop high quality. Extreme quality on mobile. For premium subscribers and those with high end smartphones (the app should be able to auto detect and adapt)

It’s been a weird week in the world of major cell providers. After years of moving away from offering unlimited plans after the rise of data-hungry smartphones, Verizon announced out of the blue on...

And inside the article is this point:

Sprint’s is a watered-down version of that: unlimited data, but game streaming is capped at 8Mbps speeds. While music tops out at 1.5Mbps, the plan does offer HD video. Once you’ve used up your 10GB of LTE tethering, Sprint bumps down to 2G speeds, not 3G. Still, it’s currently the cheapest, starting at limited-time promotion of $50 per month (plus taxes and fees) alongside an even more spectacular deal that gets five lines for $95 (plus taxes and fees) per month. Both of those prices will only last until March 31st, 2018, after which they go up.

At 1.5Mbps, it would take about 20 seconds to buffer a 3 min song playing at 160KBps so this is definitely doable.

Back in June of 2017, Bob Collymore, Safaricom CEO announced that the company would be launching a music streaming service a month later. “Skiza is great but you need to be able to stream your music. People need to be able to stream and buy your full...

I have used the app, Martin as well, perks of the job but I can’t tell you guys more because you won’t read my our article when it goes live Monday night. So just wait for it.

However, since I am feeling generous, if you have any questions, I might be inclined to answer you.

Eager to see wat music content will be there if it can move me from spotify or Apple music it’ll be worth my time

I think the platform will only have African music. In case that is what you listen to mostly, it might be perfect for you.

Streaming contracts from Sony Music, UMG, WMG etc are very very expensive.

@aydensaruni, what is the music catalog like? Is it only african music ama?

Also from the article,

The latter being the bigger issue, mobile data prices in Kenya are not the friendliest and the hope is that Safaricom has a plan to either offer subsidized streaming data bundles or some other form of deal that will make it worthy for their consumers to use the service without the service looking like an extra burden, or maybe even the ability to save the songs offline.

I really don’t like this & we need to discourage anti-net neutrality practices. It might seem like a good deal for consumers but what happens when someone else decides to launch their own service?

There’s variety not just African but your guess is as good as mine on which genres have more content.

Trey:

I really don’t like this & we need to discourage anti-net neutrality practices

You have a point but Safcom is not throttling or denying anyone access to any other service, they are just making their service more accessible by using their own resources. It’s not like Safaricom blocks Apple Music or charges more for it.

Safaricom has video bundles that work on Showmax and YouTube, no one stops any other company from brokering such a deal with the telco. It’s a competitive world and everyone is looking for ways to make their product more attractive to the consumer.

Net neutrality does not necessarily mean blocking or limiting a competitor’s service. If Safaricom offered a lower priced ‘Safaricom Beats’ bundle, that would go against the ethos of net neutrality.

There is a lot of confusion when it comes to what net neutrality entails. Here is a quick extract from Wikipedia;

Net neutrality is the principle that governments should mandate Internet service providers to treat all data on the Internet the same, and not discriminate or charge differently by user, content, website, platform, application, type of attached equipment, or method of communication. For instance, under these principles, internet service providers are unable to deliver content tailored to the capabilities of a specific device or user, offer free services or to intentionally block, slow down or charge money for specific websites and online content.

aydensaruni:

Safaricom has video bundles that work on Showmax and YouTube, no one stops any other company from brokering such a deal with the telco. It’s a competitive world and everyone is looking for ways to make their product more attractive to the consumer.

Again, this is anti-net neutrality (See extract above). It is possible that Naspers is paying Safaricom for this privilege.

What happens when a new startup is trying to compete with Showmax or Safaricom Beats? They will probably not have enough capital to broker such a deal.

Saying ‘no one stops any other company from brokering such a deal’ is a very blind way of looking at this. Get out of that little bubble you have built around you. Not every company can afford to do that. In fact, they might not have a marketing budget and instead choose to rely on organic traffic.

Adding these ‘brokered deals’ will effectively kill the organic traffic.

No good can come from making the internet pay to win.

I am looking forward to your article ‘exposing’ Safaricom’s anti-competitive ways in the near future if this keeps happening.

I think thats marketing and not necessarily a net neutrality issue. For it to qualify as “anti-net neutrality” there needs to be other services which are affected. What I mean is, its not wrong for Naspers and Saf to partner for showmax. What could be bad is if Netflix or Iflix and others complain safaricom is overcharging them for bandwidth. In my opinion I don’t think streaming market in kenya is good enough to warrant anti-net neutrality concerns. But it might in future, when maybe most kenyans prefer streaming than watching TVs, Radios, etc. I hope you get my point.

It’s interesting to see how they’re progressing from being a Telco to this. I often wonder if there is a reason why bigger global telcos have avoided the music streaming business - no real money, plenty of support headaches.

A few years ago a friend launched Waabeh with the aim of making it the ‘Spotify of Africa’. As a small player, getting artists on board was a challenge, together with adoption and scalability. Here comes a telco with more resources and a bigger footprint so those two are a non-issue.

I wonder why they wouldn’t just partner with existing businesses instead of just copy and paste? If they are really trying to support the youth as their academy claims, then why launch exact services in niche markets to compete with the same startups they say they want to support?

Here’s how I see this could work:

Artists get a bigger platform to sell their music.

People get access to music they otherwise wouldn’t find. Kenyans are willing to support artists but it has to be in a way that’s convenient. Would people pay $1 - $4.99 (KES 100 - KES 500) a month to stream their favourite artists? Probably.

All your music in one place - Hybrid (Offline + Cloud) storage beats offline only.

Ad platform - More relevant ads tailored to your tastes. Better than radio

Digital Radio in Future - They’ll have enough data after users join to determine if a telco digital radio platform would work

What it needs to be successful:

Ad Supported & Subscription Tiers

Seamlessly built app - Experience should be at par with leading music streaming apps

The Zero rated option might be their biggest incentive to attract users. Even if it’s zero rated for a certain period it will let users test it out while simultaneously allowing the telco to test its infrastructure. This might mean the telco would pay artists for any royalties due from streaming over this period - Free trial period etc - similar to what apple music did. Safcon doesn’t believe in providing free service.

To increase adoption of FTTH, they could give 3 months free subscription of upto 5 devices for any household that signs up to their FTTH.

I wonder why they wouldn’t just partner with existing businesses instead of just copy and paste? If they are really trying to support the youth as their academy claims, then why launch exact services in niche markets to compete with the same startups they say they want to support?

This i agree with you, partnering with the likes of Waabeh/Mdundo/Boomplay would pay off better in the long run. I feel that Safaricom is focusing so much on making money than winning over all those involved in this industry and not just the customers. This strategy of theirs of copy pasting instead of innovating, like with Masoko, probably won’t work
And then me i have an issue with paying for bundles on this product. If it were streaming on Spotify i would understand but for a telco’s own music streaming service, i pay for bundles then i pay for subscribing to the service, doesn’t make sense to me